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The webinar continued with international speakers from different research institutes and organizations presenting their findings and sharing their insights on the behavioural aspects and integration strategies of this new transport mode.

The list of speakers and the topic of their presentation is as follows:

• Irene Zubin, Delft University of Technology
  Lessons learned from existing pilots and deployment scenarios for automated shuttles
• Maryna Öztürker, Delft University of Technology
  User's perspective on automated minibuses and their service type
• Yusak Susilo, The University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna
  Capacity and knowledge building through multiple deployments of automated bus services
• Kara Kockelman, University of Texas at Austin
  Micro-simulations of shared automated vehicles for first-mile last-mile transit connections
• Patrick van Norden, Metropoolregio Rotterdam Den Haag (MRDH)
  Experiences and plans with automated shuttles within the Rotterdam-The Hague area
• Joop Veenis and Ahmed Hashish, The Future Mobility Network
  Experiences on real-life implementations and lessons learned

Interested? Find out more about these topics on the webinar recordings and in the speakers’ presentation.

The thesis deals with safety assessment of automated driving systems. The past three decades have witnessed the emergence of several automotive applications that take over the task of vehicle driving on a sustained basis. The most advanced class of such applications is known as Automated Driving Systems (ADSs). ADS can autonomously operate the vehicle on road stretches that fall under its operational design domain. Industry and governments expect that such systems will be technologically feasible shortly and the traffic will be mixed with system-driven and human-driven vehicles. Even though ADSequipped vehicles will have an impact on traffic safety, there is no clarity on if they would enhance or detriment traffic safety and at what conditions and magnitude. A human and an ADS apply fundamentally different processes to acquire information, make decisions, and operate the vehicle. Therefore, our current insights on the relationship between driving behaviour and safety may not be sufficient to predict the possible impacts of ADS systems. Hence there is an urgent need to study the impacts of ADS functionalities and design factors on traffic safety.

Thesis is available here.

As innovations like connected automated vehicles (CAVs) disrupt mobility as we know it, new safety challenges will keep emerging. Rather than using the traditional approach of post-collision analysis, SAFE-UP is proactively designing and analysing safety-critical scenarios in a highly automated and mixed traffic environment by integrating traffic accident data and future traffic conditions with new forms of safety metrics and sub-microscopic models in a traffic simulation platform. To validate the potential of these concepts, SAFE-UP will use two types of use cases (one urban and one non-urban) covering at least 64% of all current traffic fatalities.

Based on the findings, new safety technologies and safety assessment methodologies can be designed in tandem with the new mobility, rather than lagging behind.

SAFE-UP will address these upcoming road safety challenges by identifying future safety-critical scenarios and develop tools and new technologies accordingly, for both active and passive safety systems, in four demos.

Demo 1. Passive safety systems in new seating positions

Demo 2. VRU detection under bad weather conditions

Demo 3. Advanced intervention functions to avoid critical events

Demo 4. Communication framework for timely warning provisions

SAFE-UP’s holistic approach means that all road users are considered, including those outside the car.

To complement the safety assessment methodologies, SAFE-UP will also produce targeted education and training schemes to raise awareness of the new road safety challenges we’ll face and the best ways to tackle them.

The combined effect of the 4 SAFE-UP demonstrators will be to prevent 5244 fatalities and 173,273 serious injuries by 2050, which, compared to 2016’s figures, represents a reduction of 32.59% and 69.31% respectively, providing over 2900 jobs by 2025.

This is a joint organization by the hEAT lab (electric and automated transport research lab) and the freight and logistics lab of the Department of Transport & Planning.

In this presentation, Luis Martinez will introduce the International Transport Forum (ITF) at the OECD which is an intergovernmental organization with 59 member countries. It acts as a think tank for transport policy and organizes the Annual Summit of transport ministers. The ITF is the only global body that covers all transport modes for passengers and freight.

ITF has been developing in the last years their modeling capabilities in house. The scope of the models ranges from a very detailed microsimulation model to global aggregate forecasting models. Microsimulation models are used to analyze urban mobility behavior and test scenarios of supply or demand at a specific case study city. Aggregate models are used to global analyses that aims at estimating the current and future transport activity and externalities under different future developments. In this talk, Luis will focus on describing the current global framework of passenger and freight models the ITF developed for the Outlook 2019, ITF key publication,  and discuss how future innovations and potentially disruptive technologies and services have been incorporated and modeled in its different components.

About Luis Martinez:

Luis Martinez works as a Lead Modeller / Transport Analyst at the International Transport Forum at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, France. At the ITF he has been working on the ITF's Transport Outlook long term analysis models (urban mobility, non-urban passenger mobility and freight) and coordinate and develop projects related with shared urban mobility modelling in several cities (Lisbon, Helsinki, Auckland and Dublin).

Prior joining the ITF in 2014, Luis spent three years as Assistant Professor with the Civil Engineer Department, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal and is author of several research papers on transport modelling, transport economics and public transport design optimisation and simulation.

This automation may take the form of fully autonomous vehicles without human intervention (SAE Level 5) or, as is already the case in many modern vehicles, may take the form of driver assist features such as adaptive cruise control (ACC) or other SAE Level 1 features. Regardless of the extent of automation, changing the vehicle dynamics of a small number of vehicles in the bulk traffic flow may have substantial implications on the underlying traffic dynamics and may influence traffic stability and the development of emergent phenomena such as phantom traffic jams.

In this talk, I present some recent experimental work conducted to understand the car following behavior of commercially available ACC vehicles. The two-vehicle car following data is collected, and models are calibrated to describe the vehicle-level ACC car following behavior. These models are then analyzed for string stability. Of the seven vehicle models tested, all are found to be string unstable. To validate the models for multi-vehicle simulations, a platoon test with seven ACC following vehicles of the same make and model is also conducted.

Bio: Dr. Raphael Stern is a post doctoral fellow in the Department of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich, and will be joining the faculty in Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering at the University of Minnesota as an Assistant Professor in 2019. Prior to joining TU Munich, Dr. Stern was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Stern received a bachelor of science degree (2013), master of science degree (2015), and Ph.D. (2018) all in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Stern was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA, and a recipient of the Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship from the Federal Highway Administration. Dr. Stern's research interests are in the area of traffic control and estimation with autonomous vehicles in the flow.